The dhcpd.conf file is a free-form ASCII text file. It is parsed by
the recursive-descent parser built into dhcpd. The file may contain
extra tabs and newlines for formatting purposes. Keywords in the file
are case-insensitive. Comments may be placed anywhere within the
file (except within quotes). Comments begin with the # character and
end at the end of the line.

The file essentially consists of a list of statements. Statements
fall into two broad categories - parameters and declarations.

Parameter statements either say how to do something (e.g., how long a
lease to offer), whether to do something (e.g., should dhcpd provide
addresses to unknown clients), or what parameters to provide to the
client (e.g., use gateway 220.177.244.7).

Declarations are used to describe the topology of the
network, to describe clients on the network, to provide addresses that
can be assigned to clients, or to apply a group of parameters to a
group of declarations. In any group of parameters and declarations,
all parameters must be specified before any declarations which depend
on those parameters may be specified.

Declarations about network topology include the shared-network
and the subnet declarations. If clients on a subnet are to be
assigned addresses
dynamically, a range declaration must appear within the
subnet declaration. For clients with statically assigned
addresses, or for installations where only known clients will be
served, each such client must have a host declaration. If
parameters are to be applied to a group of declarations which are not
related strictly on a per-subnet basis, the group declaration
can be used.

For every subnet which will be served, and for every subnet
to which the dhcp server is connected, there must be one subnet
declaration, which tells dhcpd how to recognize that an address is on
that subnet. A subnet declaration is required for each subnet
even if no addresses will be dynamically allocated on that subnet.

Some installations have physical networks on which more than one IP
subnet operates. For example, if there is a site-wide requirement
that 8-bit subnet masks be used, but a department with a single
physical ethernet network expands to the point where it has more than
254 nodes, it may be necessary to run two 8-bit subnets on the same
ethernet until such time as a new physical network can be added. In
this case, the subnet declarations for these two networks must be
enclosed in a shared-network declaration.

Note that even when the shared-network declaration is absent, an
empty one is created by the server to contain the subnet (and any scoped
parameters included in the subnet). For practical purposes, this means
that "stateless" DHCP clients, which are not tied to addresses (and therefore
subnets) will receive the same configuration as stateful ones.

Some sites may have departments which have clients on more than one
subnet, but it may be desirable to offer those clients a uniform set
of parameters which are different than what would be offered to
clients from other departments on the same subnet. For clients which
will be declared explicitly with host declarations, these
declarations can be enclosed in a group declaration along with
the parameters which are common to that department. For clients
whose addresses will be dynamically assigned, class declarations and
conditional declarations may be used to group parameter assignments
based on information the client sends.

When a client is to be booted, its boot parameters are determined by
consulting that clients host declaration (if any), and then
consulting any class declarations matching the client,
followed by the pool, subnet and shared-network
declarations for the IP address assigned to the client. Each of
these declarations itself appears within a lexical scope, and all
declarations at less specific lexical scopes are also consulted for
client option declarations. Scopes are never considered
twice, and if parameters are declared in more than one scope, the
parameter declared in the most specific scope is the one that is
used.

When dhcpd tries to find a host declaration for a client, it
first looks for a host declaration which has a
fixed-address declaration that lists an IP address that is valid
for the subnet or shared network on which the client is booting. If
it doesnt find any such entry, it tries to find an entry which has
no fixed-address declaration.

Notice that at the beginning of the file, theres a place
for global parameters. These might be things like the organizations
domain name, the addresses of the name servers (if they are common to
the entire organization), and so on. So, for example:

As you can see in Figure 2, you can specify host addresses in
parameters using their domain names rather than their numeric IP
addresses. If a given hostname resolves to more than one IP address
(for example, if that host has two ethernet interfaces), then where
possible, both addresses are supplied to the client.

The most obvious reason for having subnet-specific parameters as
shown in Figure 1 is that each subnet, of necessity, has its own
router. So for the first subnet, for example, there should be
something like:

option routers 204.254.239.1;

Note that the address here is specified numerically. This is not
required - if you have a different domain name for each interface on
your router, its perfectly legitimate to use the domain name for that
interface instead of the numeric address. However, in many cases
there may be only one domain name for all of a routers IP addresses, and
it would not be appropriate to use that name here.

In Figure 1 there is also a group statement, which provides
common parameters for a set of three hosts - zappo, beppo and harpo.
As you can see, these hosts are all in the test.isc.org domain, so it
might make sense for a group-specific parameter to override the domain
name supplied to these hosts:

option domain-name "test.isc.org";

Also, given the domain theyre in, these are probably test machines.
If we wanted to test the DHCP leasing mechanism, we might set the
lease timeout somewhat shorter than the default:

max-lease-time 120;
default-lease-time 120;

You may have noticed that while some parameters start with the
option keyword, some do not. Parameters starting with the
option keyword correspond to actual DHCP options, while
parameters that do not start with the option keyword either control
the behavior of the DHCP server (e.g., how long a lease dhcpd will
give out), or specify client parameters that are not optional in the
DHCP protocol (for example, server-name and filename).

In Figure 1, each host had host-specific parameters. These
could include such things as the hostname option, the name of a
file to upload (the filename parameter) and the address of the
server from which to upload the file (the next-server
parameter). In general, any parameter can appear anywhere that
parameters are allowed, and will be applied according to the scope in
which the parameter appears.

Imagine that you have a site with a lot of NCD X-Terminals. These
terminals come in a variety of models, and you want to specify the
boot files for each model. One way to do this would be to have host
declarations for each server and group them by model:

The
pool and pool6
declarations can be used to specify a pool of addresses that will be
treated differently than another pool of addresses, even on the same
network segment or subnet. For example, you may want to provide a
large set of addresses that can be assigned to DHCP clients that are
registered to your DHCP server, while providing a smaller set of
addresses, possibly with short lease times, that are available for
unknown clients. If you have a firewall, you may be able to arrange
for addresses from one pool to be allowed access to the Internet,
while addresses in another pool are not, thus encouraging users to
register their DHCP clients. To do this, you would set up a pair of
pool declarations:

It is also possible to set up entirely different subnets for known and
unknown clients - address pools exist at the level of shared networks,
so address ranges within pool declarations can be on different
subnets.

As you can see in the preceding example, pools can have permit lists
that control which clients are allowed access to the pool and which
arent. Each entry in a pools permit list is introduced with the
allow or deny keyword. If a pool has a permit list, then only those
clients that match specific entries on the permit list will be
eligible to be assigned addresses from the pool. If a pool has a
deny list, then only those clients that do not match any entries on
the deny list will be eligible. If both permit and deny lists exist
for a pool, then only clients that match the permit list and do not
match the deny list will be allowed access.

The pool6 declaration is similar to the pool declaration.
Currently it is only allowed within a subnet6 declaration, and
may not be included directly in a shared network declaration.
In addition to the range6 statement it allows the prefix6
statement to be included. You may include range6 statements
for both NA and TA and prefixy6 statements in a single
pool6 statement.

Address allocation is actually only done when a client is in the INIT
state and has sent a DHCPDISCOVER message. If the client thinks it
has a valid lease and sends a DHCPREQUEST to initiate or renew that
lease, the server has only three choices - it can ignore the
DHCPREQUEST, send a DHCPNAK to tell the client it should stop using
the address, or send a DHCPACK, telling the client to go ahead and use
the address for a while.

If the server finds the address the client is requesting, and that
address is available to the client, the server will send a DHCPACK.
If the address is no longer available, or the client isnt permitted
to have it, the server will send a DHCPNAK. If the server knows
nothing about the address, it will remain silent, unless the address
is incorrect for the network segment to which the client has been
attached and the server is authoritative for that network segment, in
which case the server will send a DHCPNAK even though it doesnt know
about the address.

There may be a host declaration matching the clients identification.
If that host declaration contains a fixed-address declaration that
lists an IP address that is valid for the network segment to which the
client is connected. In this case, the DHCP server will never do
dynamic address allocation. In this case, the client is required
to take the address specified in the host declaration. If the
client sends a DHCPREQUEST for some other address, the server will respond
with a DHCPNAK.

When the DHCP server allocates a new address for a client (remember,
this only happens if the client has sent a DHCPDISCOVER), it first
looks to see if the client already has a valid lease on an IP address,
or if there is an old IP address the client had before that hasnt yet
been reassigned. In that case, the server will take that address and
check it to see if the client is still permitted to use it. If the
client is no longer permitted to use it, the lease is freed if the
server thought it was still in use - the fact that the client has sent
a DHCPDISCOVER proves to the server that the client is no longer using
the lease.

If no existing lease is found, or if the client is forbidden to
receive the existing lease, then the server will look in the list of
address pools for the network segment to which the client is attached
for a lease that is not in use and that the client is permitted to
have. It looks through each pool declaration in sequence (all
range declarations that appear outside of pool declarations are grouped into
a single pool with no permit list). If the permit list for the pool
allows the client to be allocated an address from that pool, the pool
is examined to see if there is an address available. If so, then the
client is tentatively assigned that address. Otherwise, the next
pool is tested. If no addresses are found that can be assigned to
the client, no response is sent to the client.

If an address is found that the client is permitted to have, and that
has never been assigned to any client before, the address is
immediately allocated to the client. If the address is available for
allocation but has been previously assigned to a different client, the
server will keep looking in hopes of finding an address that has never
before been assigned to a client.

The DHCP server generates the list of available IP addresses from a
hash table. This means that the addresses are not sorted in any
particular order, and so it is not possible to predict the order in
which the DHCP server will allocate IP addresses. Users of previous
versions of the ISC DHCP server may have become accustomed to the DHCP
server allocating IP addresses in ascending order, but this is no
longer possible, and there is no way to configure this behavior with
version 3 of the ISC DHCP server.

The DHCP server checks IP addresses to see if they are in use before
allocating them to clients. It does this by sending an ICMP Echo
request message to the IP address being allocated. If no ICMP Echo
reply is received within a second, the address is assumed to be free.
This is only done for leases that have been specified in range
statements, and only when the lease is thought by the DHCP server to
be free - i.e., the DHCP server or its failover peer has not listed
the lease as in use.

If a response is received to an ICMP Echo request, the DHCP server
assumes that there is a configuration error - the IP address is in use
by some host on the network that is not a DHCP client. It marks the
address as abandoned, and will not assign it to clients.

If a DHCP client tries to get an IP address, but none are available,
but there are abandoned IP addresses, then the DHCP server will
attempt to reclaim an abandoned IP address. It marks one IP address
as free, and then does the same ICMP Echo request check described
previously. If there is no answer to the ICMP Echo request, the
address is assigned to the client.

The DHCP server does not cycle through abandoned IP addresses if the
first IP address it tries to reclaim is free. Rather, when the next
DHCPDISCOVER comes in from the client, it will attempt a new
allocation using the same method described here, and will typically
try a new IP address.

This version of the ISC DHCP server supports the DHCP failover
protocol as documented in draft-ietf-dhc-failover-12.txt. This is
not a final protocol document, and we have not done interoperability
testing with other vendors implementations of this protocol, so you
must not assume that this implementation conforms to the standard.
If you wish to use the failover protocol, make sure that both failover
peers are running the same version of the ISC DHCP server.

The failover protocol allows two DHCP servers (and no more than two)
to share a common address pool. Each server will have about half of
the available IP addresses in the pool at any given time for
allocation. If one server fails, the other server will continue to
renew leases out of the pool, and will allocate new addresses out of
the roughly half of available addresses that it had when
communications with the other server were lost.

It is possible during a prolonged failure to tell the remaining server
that the other server is down, in which case the remaining server will
(over time) reclaim all the addresses the other server had available
for allocation, and begin to reuse them. This is called putting the
server into the PARTNER-DOWN state.

You can put the server into the PARTNER-DOWN state either by using the
omshell (1) command or by stopping the server, editing the last failover state
declaration in the lease file, and restarting the server. If you use
this last method, change the "my state" line to:

failover peer name state {my state partner-down;.peer state state at date;}

It is only required to change "my state" as shown above.

When the other server comes back online, it should automatically
detect that it has been offline and request a complete update from the
server that was running in the PARTNER-DOWN state, and then both
servers will resume processing together.

It is possible to get into a dangerous situation: if you put one
server into the PARTNER-DOWN state, and then *that* server goes down,
and the other server comes back up, the other server will not know
that the first server was in the PARTNER-DOWN state, and may issue
addresses previously issued by the other server to different clients,
resulting in IP address conflicts. Before putting a server into
PARTNER-DOWN state, therefore, make
sure that the other server will not restart automatically.

The failover protocol defines a primary server role and a secondary
server role. There are some differences in how primaries and
secondaries act, but most of the differences simply have to do with
providing a way for each peer to behave in the opposite way from the
other. So one server must be configured as primary, and the other
must be configured as secondary, and it doesnt matter too much which
one is which.

When a server starts that has not previously communicated with its
failover peer, it must establish communications with its failover peer
and synchronize with it before it can serve clients. This can happen
either because you have just configured your DHCP servers to perform
failover for the first time, or because one of your failover servers
has failed catastrophically and lost its database.

The initial recovery process is designed to ensure that when one
failover peer loses its database and then resynchronizes, any leases
that the failed server gave out before it failed will be honored.
When the failed server starts up, it notices that it has no saved
failover state, and attempts to contact its peer.

When it has established contact, it asks the peer for a complete copy
its peers lease database. The peer then sends its complete database,
and sends a message indicating that it is done. The failed server
then waits until MCLT has passed, and once MCLT has passed both
servers make the transition back into normal operation. This waiting
period ensures that any leases the failed server may have given out
while out of contact with its partner will have expired.

While the failed server is recovering, its partner remains in the
partner-down state, which means that it is serving all clients. The
failed server provides no service at all to DHCP clients until it has
made the transition into normal operation.

In the case where both servers detect that they have never before
communicated with their partner, they both come up in this recovery
state and follow the procedure we have just described. In this case,
no service will be provided to DHCP clients until MCLT has expired.

In order to configure failover, you need to write a peer declaration
that configures the failover protocol, and you need to write peer
references in each pool declaration for which you want to do
failover. You do not have to do failover for all pools on a given
network segment. You must not tell one server its doing failover
on a particular address pool and tell the other it is not. You must
not have any common address pools on which you are not doing
failover. A pool declaration that utilizes failover would look like this:

pool {
failover peer "foo";
pool specific parameters
};

The server currently does very little sanity checking, so if you
configure it wrong, it will just fail in odd ways. I would recommend
therefore that you either do failover or dont do failover, but dont
do any mixed pools. Also, use the same master configuration file for
both servers, and have a separate file that contains the peer
declaration and includes the master file. This will help you to avoid
configuration mismatches. As our implementation evolves, this will
become less of a problem. A basic sample dhcpd.conf file for a
primary server might look like this:

This determines whether the server is primary or secondary, as
described earlier under DHCP FAILOVER.

The
address statement

address address;

The address statement declares the IP address or DNS name on which the
server should listen for connections from its failover peer, and also the
value to use for the DHCP Failover Protocol server identifier. Because this
value is used as an identifier, it may not be omitted.

The
peer address statement

peer address address;

The peer address statement declares the IP address or DNS name to
which the server should connect to reach its failover peer for failover
messages.

The
port statement

port port-number;

The port statement declares the TCP port on which the server
should listen for connections from its failover peer. This statement
may be omitted, in which case the IANA assigned port number 647 will be
used by default.

The
peer port statement

peer port port-number;

The peer port statement declares the TCP port to which the
server should connect to reach its failover peer for failover
messages. This statement may be omitted, in which case the IANA
assigned port number 647 will be used by default.

The
max-response-delay statement

max-response-delay seconds;

The max-response-delay statement tells the DHCP server how
many seconds may pass without receiving a message from its failover
peer before it assumes that connection has failed. This number
should be small enough that a transient network failure that breaks
the connection will not result in the servers being out of
communication for a long time, but large enough that the server isnt
constantly making and breaking connections. This parameter must be
specified.

The
max-unacked-updates statement

max-unacked-updates count;

The max-unacked-updates statement tells the remote DHCP server how
many BNDUPD messages it can send before it receives a BNDACK
from the local system. We dont have enough operational experience
to say what a good value for this is, but 10 seems to work. This
parameter must be specified.

The
mclt statement

mclt seconds;

The mclt statement defines the Maximum Client Lead Time. It
must be specified on the primary, and may not be specified on the
secondary. This is the length of time for which a lease may be
renewed by either failover peer without contacting the other. The
longer you set this, the longer it will take for the running server to
recover IP addresses after moving into PARTNER-DOWN state. The
shorter you set it, the more load your servers will experience when
they are not communicating. A value of something like 3600 is
probably reasonable, but again bear in mind that we have no real
operational experience with this.

The
split statement

split bits;

The split statement specifies the split between the primary and
secondary for the purposes of load balancing. Whenever a client
makes a DHCP request, the DHCP server runs a hash on the client
identification, resulting in value from 0 to 255. This is used as
an index into a 256 bit field. If the bit at that index is set,
the primary is responsible. If the bit at that index is not set,
the secondary is responsible. The split value determines
how many of the leading bits are set to one. So, in practice, higher
split values will cause the primary to serve more clients than the
secondary. Lower split values, the converse. Legal values are between
0 and 256 inclusive, of which the most reasonable is 128. Note that
a value of 0 makes the secondary responsible for all clients and a value
of 256 makes the primary responsible for all clients.

The
hba statement

hba colon-separated-hex-list;

The hba statement specifies the split between the primary and
secondary as a bitmap rather than a cutoff, which theoretically allows
for finer-grained control. In practice, there is probably no need
for such fine-grained control, however. An example hba statement:

They are equivalent, because half the bits are set to 0, half are set to
1 (0xa and 0x5 are 1010 and 0101 binary respectively) and consequently this
would roughly divide the clients equally between the servers. They are not
identical, because the actual peers this would load balance to each server
are different for each example.

You must only have split or hba defined, never both. For most
cases, the fine-grained control that hba offers isnt necessary, and
split should be used.

The
load balance max seconds statement

load balance max seconds seconds;

This statement allows you to configure a cutoff after which load
balancing is disabled. The cutoff is based on the number of seconds
since the client sent its first DHCPDISCOVER or DHCPREQUEST message,
and only works with clients that correctly implement the secs
field - fortunately most clients do. We recommend setting this to
something like 3 or 5. The effect of this is that if one of the
failover peers gets into a state where it is responding to failover
messages but not responding to some client requests, the other
failover peer will take over its client load automatically as the
clients retry.

The
auto-partner-down statement

auto-partner-down seconds;

This statement instructs the server to initiate a timed delay upon entering
the communications-interrupted state (any situation of being out-of-contact
with the remote failover peer). At the conclusion of the timer, the server
will automatically enter the partner-down state. This permits the server
to allocate leases from the partners free lease pool after an STOS+MCLT
timer expires, which can be dangerous if the partner is in fact operating
at the time (the two servers will give conflicting bindings).

Think very carefully before enabling this feature. The partner-down and
communications-interrupted states are intentionally segregated because
there do exist situations where a failover server can fail to communicate
with its peer, but still has the ability to receive and reply to requests
from DHCP clients. In general, this feature should only be used in those
deployments where the failover servers are directly connected to one
another, such as by a dedicated hardwired link ("a heartbeat cable").

A zero value disables the auto-partner-down feature (also the default), and
any positive value indicates the time in seconds to wait before automatically
entering partner-down.

This version of the DHCP Server evaluates pool balance on a schedule,
rather than on demand as leases are allocated. The latter approach
proved to be slightly klunky when pool misbalanced reach total
saturation  when any server ran out of leases to assign, it also lost
its ability to notice it had run dry.

In order to understand pool balance, some elements of its operation
first need to be defined. First, there are 'free' and 'backup' leases.
Both of these are referred to as 'free state leases'. 'free' and
'backup'
are 'the free states' for the purpose of this document. The difference
is that only the primary may allocate from 'free' leases unless under
special circumstances, and only the secondary may allocate 'backup' leases.

When pool balance is performed, the only plausible expectation is to
provide a 50/50 split of the free state leases between the two servers.
This is because no one can predict which server will fail, regardless
of the relative load placed upon the two servers, so giving each server
half the leases gives both servers the same amount of 'failure endurance'.
Therefore, there is no way to configure any different behaviour, outside of
some very small windows we will describe shortly.

The first thing calculated on any pool balance run is a value referred to
as 'lts', or "Leases To Send". This, simply, is the difference in the
count of free and backup leases, divided by two. For the secondary,
it is the difference in the backup and free leases, divided by two.
The resulting value is signed: if it is positive, the local server is
expected to hand out leases to retain a 50/50 balance. If it is negative,
the remote server would need to send leases to balance the pool. Once
the lts value reaches zero, the pool is perfectly balanced (give or take
one lease in the case of an odd number of total free state leases).

The current approach is still something of a hybrid of the old approach,
marked by the presence of the max-lease-misbalance statement. This
parameter configures what used to be a 10% fixed value in previous versions:
if lts is less than free+backup * max-lease-misbalance percent, then
the server will skip balancing a given pool (it wont bother moving any
leases, even if some leases "should" be moved). The meaning of this value
is also somewhat overloaded, however, in that it also governs the estimation
of when to attempt to balance the pool (which may then also be skipped over).
The oldest leases in the free and backup states are examined. The time
they have resided in their respective queues is used as an estimate to
indicate how much time it is probable it would take before the leases at
the top of the list would be consumed (and thus, how long it would take
to use all leases in that state). This percentage is directly multiplied
by this time, and fit into the schedule if it falls within
the min-balance and max-balance configured values. The
scheduled pool check time is only moved in a downwards direction, it is
never increased. Lastly, if the lts is more than double this number in
the negative direction, the local server will 'panic' and transmit a
Failover protocol POOLREQ message, in the hopes that the remote system
will be woken up into action.

Once the lts value exceeds the max-lease-misbalance percentage of
total free state leases as described above, leases are moved to the remote
server. This is done in two passes.

In the first pass, only leases whose most recent bound client would have
been served by the remote server - according to the Load Balance Algorithm
(see above split and hba configuration statements) - are given
away to the peer. This first pass will happily continue to give away leases,
decrementing the lts value by one for each, until the lts value has reached
the negative of the total number of leases multiplied by
the max-lease-ownership percentage. So it is through this value that
you can permit a small misbalance of the lease pools - for the purpose of
giving the peer more than a 50/50 share of leases in the hopes that their
clients might some day return and be allocated by the peer (operating
normally). This process is referred to as 'MAC Address Affinity', but this
is somewhat misnamed: it applies equally to DHCP Client Identifier options.
Note also that affinity is applied to leases when they enter the state
'free' from 'expired' or 'released'. In this case also, leases will not
be moved from free to backup if the secondary already has more than its
share.

The second pass is only entered into if the first pass fails to reduce
the lts underneath the total number of free state leases multiplied by
the max-lease-ownership percentage. In this pass, the oldest
leases are given over to the peer without second thought about the Load
Balance Algorithm, and this continues until the lts falls under this
value. In this way, the local server will also happily keep a small
percentage of the leases that would normally load balance to itself.

So, the max-lease-misbalance value acts as a behavioural gate.
Smaller values will cause more leases to transition states to balance
the pools over time, higher values will decrease the amount of change
(but may lead to pool starvation if theres a run on leases).

The max-lease-ownership value permits a small (percentage) skew
in the lease balance of a percentage of the total number of free state
leases.

Finally, the min-balance and max-balance make certain that a
scheduled rebalance event happens within a reasonable timeframe (not
to be thrown off by, for example, a 7 year old free lease).

Plausible values for the percentages lie between 0 and 100, inclusive, but
values over 50 are indistinguishable from one another (once lts exceeds
50% of the free state leases, one server must therefore have 100% of the
leases in its respective free state). It is recommended to select
a max-lease-ownership value that is lower than the value selected
for the max-lease-misbalance value. max-lease-ownership
defaults to 10, and max-lease-misbalance defaults to 15.

Plausible values for the min-balance and max-balance times also
range from 0 to (2^32)-1 (or the limit of your local time_t value), but
default to values 60 and 3600 respectively (to place balance events between
1 minute and 1 hour).

Clients can be separated into classes, and treated differently
depending on what class they are in. This separation can be done
either with a conditional statement, or with a match statement within
the class declaration. It is possible to specify a limit on the
total number of clients within a particular class or subclass that may
hold leases at one time, and it is possible to specify automatic
subclassing based on the contents of the client packet.

Classing support for DHCPv6 clients was addded in 4.3.0. It follows
the same rules as for DHCPv4 except that support for billing classes
has not been added yet.

To add clients to classes based on conditional evaluation, you can
specify a matching expression in the class statement:

Note that whether you use matching expressions or add statements (or
both) to classify clients, you must always write a class declaration
for any class that you use. If there will be no match statement and
no in-scope statements for a class, the declaration should look like
this:

In addition to classes, it is possible to declare subclasses. A
subclass is a class with the same name as a regular class, but with a
specific submatch expression which is hashed for quick matching.
This is essentially a speed hack - the main difference between five
classes with match expressions and one class with five subclasses is
that it will be quicker to find the subclasses. Subclasses work as
follows:

The data following the class name in the subclass declaration is a
constant value to use in matching the match expression for the class.
When class matching is done, the server will evaluate the match
expression and then look the result up in the hash table. If it
finds a match, the client is considered a member of both the class and
the subclass.

Subclasses can be declared with or without scope. In the above
example, the sole purpose of the subclass is to allow some clients
access to one address pool, while other clients are given access to
the other pool, so these subclasses are declared without scopes. If
part of the purpose of the subclass were to define different parameter
values for some clients, you might want to declare some subclasses
with scopes.

In the above example, if you had a single client that needed some
configuration parameters, while most didnt, you might write the
following subclass declaration for that client:

In this example, weve used subclassing as a way to control address
allocation on a per-client basis. However, its also possible to use
subclassing in ways that are not specific to clients - for example, to
use the value of the vendor-class-identifier option to determine what
values to send in the vendor-encapsulated-options option. An example
of this is shown under the VENDOR ENCAPSULATED OPTIONS head in the
dhcp-options(5) manual page.

You may specify a limit to the number of clients in a class that can
be assigned leases. The effect of this will be to make it difficult
for a new client in a class to get an address. Once a class with
such a limit has reached its limit, the only way a new client in that
class can get a lease is for an existing client to relinquish its
lease, either by letting it expire, or by sending a DHCPRELEASE
packet. Classes with lease limits are specified as follows:

class "limited-1" {
lease limit 4;
}

This will produce a class in which a maximum of four members may hold
a lease at one time.

It is possible to declare a
spawning class. A spawning class is a class that automatically produces subclasses
based on what the client sends. The reason that spawning classes
were created was to make it possible to create lease-limited classes
on the fly. The envisioned application is a cable-modem environment
where the ISP wishes to provide clients at a particular site with more
than one IP address, but does not wish to provide such clients with
their own subnet, nor give them an unlimited number of IP addresses
from the network segment to which they are connected.

Many cable modem head-end systems can be configured to add a Relay
Agent Information option to DHCP packets when relaying them to the
DHCP server. These systems typically add a circuit ID or remote ID
option that uniquely identifies the customer site. To take advantage
of this, you can write a class declaration as follows:

Now whenever a request comes in from a customer site, the circuit ID
option will be checked against the class's hash table. If a subclass
is found that matches the circuit ID, the client will be classified in
that subclass and treated accordingly. If no subclass is found
matching the circuit ID, a new one will be created and logged in the
dhcpd.leases file, and the client will be classified in this new class. Once the
client has been classified, it will be treated according to the rules
of the class, including, in this case, being subject to the per-site
limit of four leases.

The use of the subclass spawning mechanism is not restricted to relay
agent options - this particular example is given only because it is a
fairly straightforward one.

In some cases, it may be useful to use one expression to assign a
client to a particular class, and a second expression to put it into a
subclass of that class. This can be done by combining the match
if and spawn with statements, or the match if and
match statements. For example:

The DHCP server has the ability to dynamically update the Domain Name
System. Within the configuration files, you can define how you want
the Domain Name System to be updated. These updates are RFC 2136
compliant so any DNS server supporting RFC 2136 should be able to
accept updates from the DHCP server.

There are two DNS schemes implemented. The interim option is
based on draft revisions of the DDNS documents while the standard
option is based on the RFCs for DHCP-DNS interaction and DHCIDs.
A third option, ad-hoc, was deprecated and has now been removed
from the code base. The DHCP server must be configured to use
one of the two currently-supported methods, or not to do DNS updates.

New installations should use the standard option. Older
installations may want to continue using the interim option for
backwards compatibility with the DNS database until the database
can be updated. This can be done with the
ddns-update-style configuration parameter.

the interim and standard DNS update schemes operate mostly according
to work from the IETF. The interim version was based on the drafts
in progress at the time while the standard is based on the completed
RFCs. The standard RFCs are:

The basic framework for the two schemes is similar with the main
material difference being that a DHCID RR is used in the standard
version while the interim versions uses a TXT RR. The format
of the TXT record bears a resemblance to the DHCID RR but it is not
equivalent (MD5 vs SHA2, field length differences etc).

In these two schemes the DHCP server does not necessarily
always update both the A and the PTR records. The FQDN option
includes a flag which, when sent by the client, indicates that the
client wishes to update its own A record. In that case, the server
can be configured either to honor the client's intentions or ignore
them. This is done with the statement allow client-updates; or
the statement ignore client-updates;. By default, client
updates are allowed.

If the server is configured to allow client updates, then if the
client sends a fully-qualified domain name in the FQDN option, the
server will use that name the client sent in the FQDN option to update
the PTR record. For example, let us say that the client is a visitor
from the "radish.org" domain, whose hostname is "jschmoe". The
server is for the "example.org" domain. The DHCP client indicates in
the FQDN option that its FQDN is "jschmoe.radish.org.". It also
indicates that it wants to update its own A record. The DHCP server
therefore does not attempt to set up an A record for the client, but
does set up a PTR record for the IP address that it assigns the
client, pointing at jschmoe.radish.org. Once the DHCP client has an
IP address, it can update its own A record, assuming that the
"radish.org" DNS server will allow it to do so.

If the server is configured not to allow client updates, or if the
client doesn't want to do its own update, the server will simply
choose a name for the client. By default, the server will choose
from the following three values:

If these defaults for choosing the host name are not appropriate
you can write your own statement to set the ddns-hostname variable
as you wish. If none of the above are found the server will use
the host declaration name (if one) and use-host-decl-names is on.

It will use its own domain name for the client. It will then update
both the A and PTR record, using the name that it chose for the client.
If the client sends a fully-qualified domain name in the fqdn option,
the server uses only the leftmost part of the domain name - in the example
above, "jschmoe" instead of "jschmoe.radish.org".

Further, if the ignore client-updates; directive is used, then
the server will in addition send a response in the DHCP packet, using
the FQDN Option, that implies to the client that it should perform its
own updates if it chooses to do so. With deny client-updates;, a
response is sent which indicates the client may not perform updates.

Both the standard and interim options also include a method to
allow more than one DHCP server to update the DNS database without
accidentally deleting A records that shouldn't be deleted nor failing
to add A records that should be added. For the standard option the
method works as follows:

When the DHCP server issues a client a new lease, it creates a text
string that is an SHA hash over the DHCP client's identification (see
RFCs 4701 & 4702 for details). The update attempts to add an A
record with the name the server chose and a DHCID record containing the
hashed identifier string (hashid). If this update succeeds, the
server is done.

If the update fails because the A record already exists, then the DHCP
server attempts to add the A record with the prerequisite that there
must be a DHCID record in the same name as the new A record, and that
DHCID record's contents must be equal to hashid. If this update
succeeds, then the client has its A record and PTR record. If it
fails, then the name the client has been assigned (or requested) is in
use, and can't be used by the client. At this point the DHCP server
gives up trying to do a DNS update for the client until the client
chooses a new name.

The server also does not update very aggressively. Because each
DNS update involves a round trip to the DNS server, there is a cost
associated with doing updates even if they do not actually modify
the DNS database. So the DHCP server tracks whether or not it has
updated the record in the past (this information is stored on the
lease) and does not attempt to update records that it
thinks it has already updated.

This can lead to cases where the DHCP server adds a record, and then
the record is deleted through some other mechanism, but the server
never again updates the DNS because it thinks the data is already
there. In this case the data can be removed from the lease through
operator intervention, and once this has been done, the DNS will be
updated the next time the client renews.

The interim DNS update scheme was written before the RFCs were finalized
and does not quite follow them. The RFCs call for a new DHCID RRtype
while he interim DNS update scheme uses a TXT record. In addition
the ddns-resolution draft called for the DHCP server to put a DHCID RR
on the PTR record, but the interim update method does not do this.
In the final RFC this requirement was relaxed such that a server may
add a DHCID RR to the PTR record.

When you set your DNS server up to allow updates from the DHCP server,
you may be exposing it to unauthorized updates. To avoid this, you
should use TSIG signatures - a method of cryptographically signing
updates using a shared secret key. As long as you protect the
secrecy of this key, your updates should also be secure. Note,
however, that the DHCP protocol itself provides no security, and that
clients can therefore provide information to the DHCP server which the
DHCP server will then use in its updates, with the constraints
described previously.

The DNS server must be configured to allow updates for any zone that
the DHCP server will be updating. For example, let us say that
clients in the sneedville.edu domain will be assigned addresses on the
10.10.17.0/24 subnet. In that case, you will need a key declaration
for the TSIG key you will be using, and also two zone declarations -
one for the zone containing A records that will be updates and one for
the zone containing PTR records - for ISC BIND, something like this:

The primary statement specifies the IP address of the name
server whose zone information is to be updated. In addition to
the primary statement there are also the primary6 ,
secondary and secondary6 statements. The primary6
statement specifies an IPv6 address for the name server. The
secondaries provide for additional addresses for name servers
to be used if the primary does not respond. The number of name
servers the DDNS code will attempt to use before giving up
is limited and is currently set to three.

Note that the zone declarations have to correspond to authority
records in your name server - in the above example, there must be an
SOA record for "example.org." and for "17.10.10.in-addr.arpa.". For
example, if there were a subdomain "foo.example.org" with no separate
SOA, you could not write a zone declaration for "foo.example.org."
Also keep in mind that zone names in your DHCP configuration should end in a
"."; this is the preferred syntax. If you do not end your zone name in a
".", the DHCP server will figure it out. Also note that in the DHCP
configuration, zone names are not encapsulated in quotes where there are in
the DNS configuration.

You should choose your own secret key, of course. The ISC BIND 9
distribution comes with a program for generating secret keys called
dnssec-keygen. If you are using BIND 9's
dnssec-keygen, the above key would be created as follows:

dnssec-keygen -a HMAC-MD5 -b 128 -n USER DHCP_UPDATER

The key name, algorithm, and secret must match that being used by the DNS
server. The DHCP server currently supports the following algorithms:

HMAC-MD5
HMAC-SHA1
HMAC-SHA224
HMAC-SHA256
HMAC-SHA384
HMAC-SHA512

You may wish to enable logging of DNS updates on your DNS server.
To do so, you might write a logging statement like the following:

You must create the /var/log/named-auth.info and
/var/log/update-debug.log files before starting the name server. For
more information on configuring ISC BIND, consult the documentation
that accompanies it.

There are three kinds of events that can happen regarding a lease, and
it is possible to declare statements that occur when any of these
events happen. These events are the commit event, when the server
has made a commitment of a certain lease to a client, the release
event, when the client has released the server from its commitment,
and the expiry event, when the commitment expires.

To declare a set of statements to execute when an event happens, you
must use the on statement, followed by the name of the event,
followed by a series of statements to execute when the event happens,
enclosed in braces.

The include statement is used to read in a named file, and process
the contents of that file as though it were entered in place of the
include statement.

Theshared-networkstatement

shared-networkname{
[ parameters ]
[ declarations ]
}

The shared-network statement is used to inform the DHCP server
that some IP subnets actually share the same physical network. Any
subnets in a shared network should be declared within a
shared-network statement. Parameters specified in the
shared-network statement will be used when booting clients on
those subnets unless parameters provided at the subnet or host level
override them. If any subnet in a shared network has addresses
available for dynamic allocation, those addresses are collected into a
common pool for that shared network and assigned to clients as needed.
There is no way to distinguish on which subnet of a shared network a
client should boot.

Name should be the name of the shared network. This name is used when
printing debugging messages, so it should be descriptive for the
shared network. The name may have the syntax of a valid domain name
(although it will never be used as such), or it may be any arbitrary
name, enclosed in quotes.

Thesubnetstatement

subnetsubnet-numbernetmasknetmask{
[ parameters ]
[ declarations ]
}

The subnet statement is used to provide dhcpd with enough
information to tell whether or not an IP address is on that subnet.
It may also be used to provide subnet-specific parameters and to
specify what addresses may be dynamically allocated to clients booting
on that subnet. Such addresses are specified using the range
declaration.

The
subnet-number should be an IP address or domain name which resolves to the subnet
number of the subnet being described. The
netmask should be an IP address or domain name which resolves to the subnet mask
of the subnet being described. The subnet number, together with the
netmask, are sufficient to determine whether any given IP address is
on the specified subnet.

Although a netmask must be given with every subnet declaration, it is
recommended that if there is any variance in subnet masks at a site, a
subnet-mask option statement be used in each subnet declaration to set
the desired subnet mask, since any subnet-mask option statement will
override the subnet mask declared in the subnet statement.

Thesubnet6statement

subnet6subnet6-number{
[ parameters ]
[ declarations ]
}

The subnet6 statement is used to provide dhcpd with enough
information to tell whether or not an IPv6 address is on that subnet6.
It may also be used to provide subnet-specific parameters and to
specify what addresses may be dynamically allocated to clients booting
on that subnet.

The
subnet6-number should be an IPv6 network identifier, specified as ip6-address/bits.

Therangestatement

range [ dynamic-bootp ] low-address [ high-address];

For any subnet on which addresses will be assigned dynamically, there
must be at least one range statement. The range statement
gives the lowest and highest IP addresses in a range. All IP
addresses in the range should be in the subnet in which the
range statement is declared. The dynamic-bootp flag may
be specified if addresses in the specified range may be dynamically
assigned to BOOTP clients as well as DHCP clients. When specifying a
single address, high-address can be omitted.

For any IPv6 subnet6 on which addresses will be assigned dynamically, there
must be at least one range6 statement. The range6 statement
can either be the lowest and highest IPv6 addresses in a range6, or
use CIDR notation, specified as ip6-address/bits. All IP addresses
in the range6 should be in the subnet6 in which the
range6 statement is declared.

The temporary variant makes the prefix (by default on 64 bits) available
for temporary (RFC 4941) addresses. A new address per prefix in the shared
network is computed at each request with an IA_TA option. Release and Confirm
ignores temporary addresses.

Any IPv6 addresses given to hosts with fixed-address6 are excluded
from the range6, as are IPv6 addresses on the server itself.

Theprefix6statement

prefix6low-addresshigh-address/bits;

The prefix6 is the range6 equivalent for Prefix Delegation
(RFC 3633). Prefixes of bits length are assigned between
low-address and high-address.

Any IPv6 prefixes given to static entries (hosts) with fixed-prefix6
are excluded from the prefix6.

This statement is currently global but it should have a shared-network scope.

Thehoststatement

hosthostname {
[ parameters ]
[ declarations ]
}

The
host declaration provides a way for the DHCP server to identify a DHCP or
BOOTP client. This allows the server to provide configuration
information including fixed addresses or, in DHCPv6, fixed prefixes
for a specific client.

If it is desirable to be able to boot a DHCP or BOOTP client on more than one
subnet with fixed v4 addresses, more than one address may be specified in the
fixed-address declaration, or more than one
host statement may be specified matching the same client.

The
fixed-address6 delcaration is used for v6 addresses. At this time it only works with a single
address. For multiple addresses specify multiple
host statements.

If client-specific boot parameters must change based on the network
to which the client is attached, then multiple
host declarations should be used. The
host declarations will only match a client if one of their
fixed-address statements is viable on the subnet (or shared network) where the client is
attached. Conversely, for a
host declaration to match a client being allocated a dynamic address, it must not
have any
fixed-address statements. You may therefore need a mixture of
host declarations for any given client...some having
fixed-address statements, others without.

hostname should be a name identifying the host. If a hostname option is
not specified for the host, hostname is used.

Host declarations are matched to actual DHCP or BOOTP clients
by matching the dhcp-client-identifier option specified in the
host declaration to the one supplied by the client, or, if the
host declaration or the client does not provide a
dhcp-client-identifier option, by matching the hardware
parameter in the host declaration to the network hardware
address supplied by the client. BOOTP clients do not normally
provide a dhcp-client-identifier, so the hardware address must
be used for all clients that may boot using the BOOTP protocol.

DHCPv6 servers can use the host-identifier option parameter in
the host declaration, and specify any option with a fixed value
to identify hosts.

Please be aware that
only the dhcp-client-identifier option and the hardware address can be
used to match a host declaration, or the host-identifier option
parameter for DHCPv6 servers. For example, it is not possible to
match a host declaration to a host-name option. This is
because the host-name option cannot be guaranteed to be unique for any
given client, whereas both the hardware address and
dhcp-client-identifier option are at least theoretically
guaranteed to be unique to a given client.

Thegroupstatement

group {
[ parameters ]
[ declarations ]
}

The group statement is used simply to apply one or more parameters to
a group of declarations. It can be used to group hosts, shared
networks, subnets, or even other groups.

The
allow and
deny statements can be used to control the response of the DHCP server to
various sorts of requests. The allow and deny keywords actually have
different meanings depending on the context. In a pool context, these
keywords can be used to set up access lists for address allocation
pools. In other contexts, the keywords simply control general server
behavior with respect to clients based on scope. In a non-pool
context, the
ignore keyword can be used in place of the
deny keyword to prevent logging of denied requests.

The following usages of allow and deny will work in any scope,
although it is not recommended that they be used in pool
declarations.

Theunknown-clientskeyword

allow unknown-clients;deny unknown-clients;ignore unknown-clients;

The unknown-clients flag is used to tell dhcpd whether
or not to dynamically assign addresses to unknown clients. Dynamic
address assignment to unknown clients is allowed by default.
An unknown client is simply a client that has no host declaration.

The use of this option is now deprecated. If you are trying to
restrict access on your network to known clients, you should use deny
unknown-clients; inside of your address pool, as described under the
heading ALLOW AND DENY WITHIN POOL DECLARATIONS.

Thebootpkeyword

allow bootp;deny bootp;ignore bootp;

The bootp flag is used to tell dhcpd whether
or not to respond to bootp queries. Bootp queries are allowed
by default.

Thebootingkeyword

allow booting;deny booting;ignore booting;

The booting flag is used to tell dhcpd whether or not to respond
to queries from a particular client. This keyword only has meaning
when it appears in a host declaration. By default, booting is
allowed, but if it is disabled for a particular client, then
that client will not be able to get an address from the DHCP server.

Theduplicateskeyword

allow duplicates;deny duplicates;

Host declarations can match client messages based on the DHCP Client
Identifier option or based on the clients network hardware type and
MAC address. If the MAC address is used, the host declaration will
match any client with that MAC address - even clients with different
client identifiers. This doesnt normally happen, but is possible
when one computer has more than one operating system installed on it -
for example, Microsoft Windows and NetBSD or Linux.

The duplicates flag tells the DHCP server that if a request is
received from a client that matches the MAC address of a host
declaration, any other leases matching that MAC address should be
discarded by the server, even if the UID is not the same. This is a
violation of the DHCP protocol, but can prevent clients whose client
identifiers change regularly from holding many leases at the same time.
By default, duplicates are allowed.

Thedeclineskeyword

allow declines;deny declines;ignore declines;

The DHCPDECLINE message is used by DHCP clients to indicate that the
lease the server has offered is not valid. When the server receives
a DHCPDECLINE for a particular address, it normally abandons that
address, assuming that some unauthorized system is using it.
Unfortunately, a malicious or buggy client can, using DHCPDECLINE
messages, completely exhaust the DHCP servers allocation pool. The
server will eventually reclaim these leases, but not while the client
is running through the pool. This may cause serious thrashing in the DNS,
and it will also cause the DHCP server to forget old DHCP client address
allocations.

The declines flag tells the DHCP server whether or not to honor
DHCPDECLINE messages. If it is set to deny or ignore in
a particular scope, the DHCP server will not respond to DHCPDECLINE
messages.

The declines flag is only supported by DHCPv4 servers. Given the large
IPv6 address space and the internal limits imposed by the servers
address generation mechanism we dont think it is necessary for DHCPv6
servers at this time.

Currently, abandoned IPv6 addresses are reclaimed in one of two ways:
a) Client renews a specific address:
If a client using a given DUID submits a DHCP REQUEST containing
the last address abandoned by that DUID, the address will be
reassigned to that client.

b) Upon the second restart following an address abandonment. When
an address is abandoned it is both recorded as such in the lease
file and retained as abandoned in server memory until the server
is restarted. Upon restart, the server will process the lease file
and all addresses whose last known state is abandoned will be
retained as such in memory but not rewritten to the lease file.
This means that a subsequent restart of the server will not see the
abandoned addresses in the lease file and therefore have no record
of them as abandoned in memory and as such perceive them as free
for assignment.

The total number addresses in a pool, available for a given DUID value,
is internally limited by the servers address generation mechanism. If
through mistaken configuration, multiple clients are using the same
DUID they will competing for the same addresses causing the server to reach
this internal limit rather quickly. The internal limit isolates this type
of activity such that address range is not exhausted for other DUID values.
The appearance of the following error log, can be an indication of this
condition:

"Best match for DUID <XX> is an abandoned address, This may be a
result of multiple clients attempting to use this DUID"

where <XX> is an actual DUID value depicted as colon separated
string of bytes in hexadecimal values.

Theclient-updateskeyword

allow client-updates;deny client-updates;

The client-updates flag tells the DHCP server whether or not to
honor the clients intention to do its own update of its A record.
This is only relevant when doing interim DNS updates. See the
documentation under the heading THE INTERIM DNS UPDATE SCHEME for
details.

Theleasequerykeyword

allow leasequery;deny leasequery;

The leasequery flag tells the DHCP server whether or not to
answer DHCPLEASEQUERY packets. The answer to a DHCPLEASEQUERY packet
includes information about a specific lease, such as when it was
issued and when it will expire. By default, the server will not
respond to these packets.

The uses of the allow and deny keywords shown in the previous section
work pretty much the same way whether the client is sending a
DHCPDISCOVER or a DHCPREQUEST message - an address will be allocated
to the client (either the old address its requesting, or a new
address) and then that address will be tested to see if its okay to
let the client have it. If the client requested it, and its not
okay, the server will send a DHCPNAK message. Otherwise, the server
will simply not respond to the client. If it is okay to give the
address to the client, the server will send a DHCPACK message.

The primary motivation behind pool declarations is to have address
allocation pools whose allocation policies are different. A client
may be denied access to one pool, but allowed access to another pool
on the same network segment. In order for this to work, access
control has to be done during address allocation, not after address
allocation is done.

When a DHCPREQUEST message is processed, address allocation simply
consists of looking up the address the client is requesting and seeing
if its still available for the client. If it is, then the DHCP
server checks both the address pool permit lists and the relevant
in-scope allow and deny statements to see if its okay to give the
lease to the client. In the case of a DHCPDISCOVER message, the
allocation process is done as described previously in the ADDRESS
ALLOCATION section.

When declaring permit lists for address allocation pools, the
following syntaxes are recognized following the allow or deny keywords:

known-clients;

If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
this pool to any client that has a host declaration (i.e., is known).
A client is known if it has a host declaration in any scope, not
just the current scope.

unknown-clients;

If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
this pool to any client that has no host declaration (i.e., is not
known).

members of "class";

If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
this pool to any client that is a member of the named class.

dynamic bootp clients;

If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
this pool to any bootp client.

authenticated clients;

If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
this pool to any client that has been authenticated using the DHCP
authentication protocol. This is not yet supported.

unauthenticated clients;

If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
this pool to any client that has not been authenticated using the DHCP
authentication protocol. This is not yet supported.

all clients;

If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
this pool to all clients. This can be used when you want to write a
pool declaration for some reason, but hold it in reserve, or when you
want to renumber your network quickly, and thus want the server to
force all clients that have been allocated addresses from this pool to
obtain new addresses immediately when they next renew.

after time;

If specified, this statement either allows or prevents allocation from
this pool after a given date. This can be used when you want to move
clients from one pool to another. The server adjusts the regular lease
time so that the latest expiry time is at the given time+min-lease-time.
A short min-lease-time enforces a step change, whereas a longer
min-lease-time allows for a gradual change.
time is either second since epoch, or a UTC time string e.g.
4 2007/08/24 09:14:32 or a string with time zone offset in seconds
e.g. 4 2007/08/24 11:14:32 -7200

When the number of allocated leases within a pool rises above
the percentage given in this statement, the DHCP server decreases
the lease length for new clients within this pool to min-lease-time
seconds. Clients renewing an already valid (long) leases get at least the
remaining time from the current lease. Since the leases expire faster,
the server may either recover more quickly or avoid pool exhaustion
entirely. Once the number of allocated leases drop below the threshold,
the server reverts back to normal lease times. Valid percentages are
between 1 and 99.

The
always-broadcast statement

always-broadcast flag;

The DHCP and BOOTP protocols both require DHCP and BOOTP clients to
set the broadcast bit in the flags field of the BOOTP message header.
Unfortunately, some DHCP and BOOTP clients do not do this, and
therefore may not receive responses from the DHCP server. The DHCP
server can be made to always broadcast its responses to clients by
setting this flag to 'on' for the relevant scope; relevant scopes would be
inside a conditional statement, as a parameter for a class, or as a parameter
for a host declaration. To avoid creating excess broadcast traffic on your
network, we recommend that you restrict the use of this option to as few
clients as possible. For example, the Microsoft DHCP client is known not
to have this problem, as are the OpenTransport and ISC DHCP clients.

The
always-reply-rfc1048 statement

always-reply-rfc1048 flag;

Some BOOTP clients expect RFC1048-style responses, but do not follow
RFC1048 when sending their requests. You can tell that a client is
having this problem if it is not getting the options you have
configured for it and if you see in the server log the message
"(non-rfc1048)" printed with each BOOTREQUEST that is logged.

If you want to send rfc1048 options to such a client, you can set the
always-reply-rfc1048 option in that clients host declaration, and the DHCP server will
respond with an RFC-1048-style vendor options field. This flag can
be set in any scope, and will affect all clients covered by that
scope.

The
authoritative statement

authoritative;

not authoritative;

The DHCP server will normally assume that the configuration
information about a given network segment is not known to be correct
and is not authoritative. This is so that if a naive user installs a
DHCP server not fully understanding how to configure it, it does not
send spurious DHCPNAK messages to clients that have obtained addresses
from a legitimate DHCP server on the network.

Network administrators setting up authoritative DHCP servers for their
networks should always write authoritative; at the top of their
configuration file to indicate that the DHCP server should send
DHCPNAK messages to misconfigured clients. If this is not done,
clients will be unable to get a correct IP address after changing
subnets until their old lease has expired, which could take quite a
long time.

Usually, writing authoritative; at the top level of the file
should be sufficient. However, if a DHCP server is to be set up so
that it is aware of some networks for which it is authoritative and
some networks for which it is not, it may be more appropriate to
declare authority on a per-network-segment basis.

Note that the most specific scope for which the concept of authority
makes any sense is the physical network segment - either a
shared-network statement or a subnet statement that is not contained
within a shared-network statement. It is not meaningful to specify
that the server is authoritative for some subnets within a shared
network, but not authoritative for others, nor is it meaningful to
specify that the server is authoritative for some host declarations
and not others.

The boot-unknown-clients statement

boot-unknown-clients flag;

If the boot-unknown-clients statement is present and has a value
of false or off, then clients for which there is no
host declaration will not be allowed to obtain IP addresses. If this
statement is not present or has a value of true or on,
then clients without host declarations will be allowed to obtain IP
addresses, as long as those addresses are not restricted by
allow and deny statements within their pool declarations.

The db-time-format statement

db-time-format [ default | local ] ;

The DHCP server software outputs several timestamps when writing leases to
persistent storage. This configuration parameter selects one of two output
formats. The default format prints the day, date, and time in UTC,
while the local format prints the system seconds-since-epoch, and
helpfully provides the day and time in the system timezone in a comment.
The time formats are described in detail in the dhcpd.leases(5) manpage.

The ddns-hostname statement

ddns-hostname name;

The name parameter should be the hostname that will be used in
setting up the clients A and PTR records. If no ddns-hostname is
specified in scope, then the server will derive the hostname
automatically, using an algorithm that varies for each of the
different update methods.

The ddns-domainname statement

ddns-domainname name;

The name parameter should be the domain name that will be
appended to the clients hostname to form a fully-qualified
domain-name (FQDN).

The dns-local-address4 and dns-local-address6 statements

ddns-local-address4 address;

ddns-local-address6 address;

The address parameter should be the local IPv4 or IPv6 address
the server should use as the from address when sending DDNS update
requests.

The ddns-rev-domainname statement

ddns-rev-domainname name;

The name parameter should be the domain name that will be
appended to the clients reversed IP address to produce a name for use
in the clients PTR record. By default, this is "in-addr.arpa.", but
the default can be overridden here.

The reversed IP address to which this domain name is appended is
always the IP address of the client, in dotted quad notation, reversed
- for example, if the IP address assigned to the client is
10.17.92.74, then the reversed IP address is 74.92.17.10. So a
client with that IP address would, by default, be given a PTR record
of 10.17.92.74.in-addr.arpa.

The ddns-update-style parameter

ddns-update-style style;

The
style parameter must be one of standard, interim or none.
The ddns-update-style statement is only meaningful in the outer
scope - it is evaluated once after reading the dhcpd.conf file, rather
than each time a client is assigned an IP address, so there is no way
to use different DNS update styles for different clients. The default
is none.

Theddns-updatesstatement

ddns-updates flag;

The ddns-updates parameter controls whether or not the server will
attempt to do a DNS update when a lease is confirmed. Set this to off
if the server should not attempt to do updates within a certain scope.
The ddns-updates parameter is on by default. To disable DNS
updates in all scopes, it is preferable to use the
ddns-update-style statement, setting the style to none.

The
default-lease-time statement

default-lease-time time;

Time should be the length in seconds that will be assigned to a lease if
the client requesting the lease does not ask for a specific expiration
time. This is used for both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 leases (it is also known
as the "valid lifetime" in DHCPv6).
The default is 43200 seconds.

The
delayed-ack and
max-ack-delay statements

delayed-ack count;

max-ack-delay microseconds;

Count should be an integer value from zero to 2^16-1, and defaults to 28. The
count represents how many DHCPv4 replies maximum will be queued pending
transmission until after a database commit event. If this number is
reached, a database commit event (commonly resulting in fsync() and
representing a performance penalty) will be made, and the reply packets
will be transmitted in a batch afterwards. This preserves the RFC2131
direction that "stable storage" be updated prior to replying to clients.
Should the DHCPv4 sockets "go dry" (select() returns immediately with no
read sockets), the commit is made and any queued packets are transmitted.

Similarly, microseconds indicates how many microseconds are permitted
to pass inbetween queuing a packet pending an fsync, and performing the
fsync. Valid values range from 0 to 2^32-1, and defaults to 250,000 (1/4 of
a second).

Please note that as delayed-ack is currently experimental, the delayed-ack
feature is not compiled in by default, but must be enabled at compile time
with './configure --enable-delayed-ack'.

The
dhcp-cache-threshold statement

dhcp-cache-threshold percentage;

The dhcp-cache-threshold statement takes one integer parameter
with allowed values between 0 and 100. The default value is 25 (25% of
the lease time). This parameter expresses the percentage of the total
lease time, measured from the beginning, during which a
clients attempt to renew its lease will result in getting
the already assigned lease, rather than an extended lease.

Clients that attempt renewal frequently can cause the server to
update and write the database frequently resulting in a performance
impact on the server. The dhcp-cache-threshold
statement instructs the DHCP server to avoid updating leases too
frequently thus avoiding this behavior. Instead the server assigns the
same lease (i.e. reuses it) with no modifications except for CLTT (Client Last
Transmission Time) which does not require disk operations. This
feature applies to IPv4 only.

When an existing lease is matched to a renewing client, it will be reused
if all of the following conditions are true:

1. The dhcp-cache-threshold is larger than zero
2. The current lease is active
3. The percentage of the lease time that has elapsed is less than
dhcp-cache-threshold
4. The client information provided in the renewal does not alter
any of the following:
a. DNS information and DNS updates are enabled
b. Billing class to which the lease is associated

The
do-forward-updates statement

do-forward-updates flag;

The do-forward-updates statement instructs the DHCP server as
to whether it should attempt to update a DHCP client's A record
when the client acquires or renews a lease. This statement has no
effect unless DNS updates are enabled. Forward updates are enabled
by default. If this statement is used to disable forward updates,
the DHCP server will never attempt to update the client's A record,
and will only ever attempt to update the client's PTR record if the
client supplies an FQDN that should be placed in the PTR record using
the fqdn option. If forward updates are enabled, the DHCP server
will still honor the setting of the client-updates flag.

The
dont-use-fsync statement

dont-use-fsync flag;

The dont-use-fsync statement instructs the DHCP server if
it should call fsync() when writing leases to the lease file. By
default and if the flag is set to false the server will call
fsync(). Suppressing the call to fsync() may increase the performance
of the server but it also adds a risk that a lease will not be
properly written to the disk after it has been issued to a client
and before the server stops. This can lead to duplicate leases
being issued to different clients. Using this option is not
recommended\FR.

The
dynamic-bootp-lease-cutoff statement

dynamic-bootp-lease-cutoff date;

The dynamic-bootp-lease-cutoff statement sets the ending time
for all leases assigned dynamically to BOOTP clients. Because BOOTP
clients do not have any way of renewing leases, and dont know that
their leases could expire, by default dhcpd assigns infinite leases
to all BOOTP clients. However, it may make sense in some situations
to set a cutoff date for all BOOTP leases - for example, the end of a
school term, or the time at night when a facility is closed and all
machines are required to be powered off.

Date should be the date on which all assigned BOOTP leases will end. The
date is specified in the form:

W YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS

W is the day of the week expressed as a number
from zero (Sunday) to six (Saturday). YYYY is the year, including the
century. MM is the month expressed as a number from 1 to 12. DD is
the day of the month, counting from 1. HH is the hour, from zero to
23. MM is the minute and SS is the second. The time is always in
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), not local time.

The
dynamic-bootp-lease-length statement

dynamic-bootp-lease-lengthlength;

The dynamic-bootp-lease-length statement is used to set the
length of leases dynamically assigned to BOOTP clients. At some
sites, it may be possible to assume that a lease is no longer in
use if its holder has not used BOOTP or DHCP to get its address within
a certain time period. The period is specified in length as a
number of seconds. If a client reboots using BOOTP during the
timeout period, the lease duration is reset to length, so a
BOOTP client that boots frequently enough will never lose its lease.
Needless to say, this parameter should be adjusted with extreme
caution.

The
echo-client-id statement

echo-client-idflag;

The echo-client-id statement is used to enable or disable RFC 6842
compliant behavior. If the echo-client-id statement is present and has a
value of true or on, and a DHCP DISCOVER or REQUEST is received which contains
the client identifier option (Option code 61), the server will copy the option
into its response (DHCP ACK or NAK) per RFC 6842. In other words if the
client sends the option it will receive it back. By default, this flag is off
and client identifiers will not echoed back to the client.

The
filename statement

filenamefilename ;

The filename statement can be used to specify the name of the
initial boot file which is to be loaded by a client. The
filename should be a filename recognizable to whatever file transfer protocol
the client can be expected to use to load the file.

The
fixed-address declaration

fixed-address address [,address ... ];

The fixed-address declaration is used to assign one or more fixed
IP addresses to a client. It should only appear in a host
declaration. If more than one address is supplied, then when the
client boots, it will be assigned the address that corresponds to the
network on which it is booting. If none of the addresses in the
fixed-address statement are valid for the network to which the client
is connected, that client will not match the host declaration
containing that fixed-address declaration. Each address
in the fixed-address declaration should be either an IP address or
a domain name that resolves to one or more IP addresses.

The
fixed-address6 declaration

fixed-address6 ip6-address ;

The fixed-address6 declaration is used to assign a fixed
IPv6 addresses to a client. It should only appear in a host
declaration.

The
fixed-prefix6 declaration

fixed-prefix6low-address/bits;

The fixed-prefix6 declaration is used to assign a fixed
IPv6 prefix to a client. It should only appear in a host
declaration, but multiple fixed-prefix6 statements may appear
in a single host declaration.

The low-address specifies the start of the prefix and the bits
specifies the size of the prefix in bits.

If there are multiple prefixes for a given host entry the server will
choose one that matches the requested prefix size or, if none match,
the first one.

If there are multiple host delcarations the server will try to
choose a declaration where the fixed-address6 matches the clients
subnet. If none match it will choose one that doesnt have a fixed-address6
statement.

Note Well: Unlike the fixed address the fixed prefix does not need to match
a subnet in order to be served. This allows you to provide a prefix to
a client that is outside of the subnet on which the client makes the request
to the the server.

The
get-lease-hostnames statement

get-lease-hostnamesflag;

The get-lease-hostnames statement is used to tell dhcpd whether
or not to look up the domain name corresponding to the IP address of
each address in the lease pool and use that address for the DHCP
hostname option. If flag is true, then this lookup is
done for all addresses in the current scope. By default, or if
flag is false, no lookups are done.

The
hardware statement

hardware hardware-type hardware-address;

In order for a BOOTP client to be recognized, its network hardware
address must be declared using a hardware clause in the
host statement.
hardware-type must be the name of a physical hardware interface type. Currently,
only the
ethernet and
token-ring types are recognized, although support for a
fddi hardware type (and others) would also be desirable.
The
hardware-address should be a set of hexadecimal octets (numbers from 0 through ff)
separated by colons. The hardware statement may also be used
for DHCP clients.

The
host-identifier option statement

host-identifier option option-name option-data;

or

host-identifier v6relopt number option-name option-data;

This identifies a DHCPv6 client in a
host statement.
option-name is any option, and
option-data is the value for the option that the client will send. The
option-data must be a constant value. In the v6relopts case the additional number
is the relay to examine for the specified option name and value. The
values are the same as for the v6relay option. 0 is a no-op, 1 is the
relay closest to the client, 2 the next one in and so on. Values that
are larger than the maximum number of relays (currently 32) indicate the
relay closest to the server independent of number.

The
ignore-client-uids statement

ignore-client-uids flag;

If the ignore-client-uids statement is present and has a value of
true or on, the UID for clients will not be recorded.
If this statement is not present or has a value of false or
off, then client UIDs will be recorded.

The
infinite-is-reserved statement

infinite-is-reserved flag;

ISC DHCP now supports 'reserved' leases. See the section on RESERVED LEASES
below. If this flag is on, the server will automatically reserve leases
allocated to clients which requested an infinite (0xffffffff) lease-time.

The default is off.

The
lease-file-name statement

lease-file-name name;

Name should be the name of the DHCP servers lease file. By default, this
is DBDIR/dhcpd.leases. This statement must appear in the outer
scope of the configuration file - if it appears in some other scope,
it will have no effect. Furthermore, it has no effect if overridden
by the
-lf flag or the
PATH_DHCPD_DB environment variable.

The
limit-addrs-per-ia statement

limit-addrs-per-ia number;

By default, the DHCPv6 server will limit clients to one IAADDR per IA
option, meaning one address. If you wish to permit clients to hang onto
multiple addresses at a time, configure a larger number here.

Note that there is no present method to configure the server to forcibly
configure the client with one IP address per each subnet on a shared network.
This is left to future work.

The
dhcpv6-lease-file-name statement

dhcpv6-lease-file-name name;

Name is the name of the lease file to use if and only if the server is running
in DHCPv6 mode. By default, this is DBDIR/dhcpd6.leases. This statement,
like
lease-file-name,must appear in the outer scope of the configuration file. It
has no effect if overridden by the
-lf flag or the
PATH_DHCPD6_DB environment variable. If
dhcpv6-lease-file-name is not specified, but
lease-file-name is, the latter value will be used.

The
local-port statement

local-port port;

This statement causes the DHCP server to listen for DHCP requests on
the UDP port specified in port, rather than on port 67.

The
local-address statement

local-address address;

This statement causes the DHCP server to listen for DHCP requests sent
to the specified address, rather than requests sent to all addresses.
Since serving directly attached DHCP clients implies that the server must
respond to requests sent to the all-ones IP address, this option cannot be
used if clients are on directly attached networks; it is only realistically
useful for a server whose only clients are reached via unicasts, such as via
DHCP relay agents.

Note: This statement is only effective if the server was compiled using
the USE_SOCKETS #define statement, which is default on a small number of
operating systems, and must be explicitly chosen at compile-time for all
others. You can be sure if your server is compiled with USE_SOCKETS if
you see lines of this format at startup:

Listening on Socket/eth0

Note also that since this bind()s all DHCP sockets to the specified
address, that only one address may be supported in a daemon at a given
time.

The
log-facility statement

log-facility facility;

This statement causes the DHCP server to do all of its logging on the
specified log facility once the dhcpd.conf file has been read. By
default the DHCP server logs to the daemon facility. Possible log
facilities include auth, authpriv, cron, daemon, ftp, kern, lpr, mail,
mark, news, ntp, security, syslog, user, uucp, and local0 through
local7. Not all of these facilities are available on all systems,
and there may be other facilities available on other systems.

In addition to setting this value, you may need to modify your
syslog.conf file to configure logging of the DHCP server. For example, you might
add a line like this:

local7.debug /var/log/dhcpd.log

The syntax of the syslog.conf file may be different on some
operating systems - consult the syslog.conf manual page to be
sure. To get syslog to start logging to the new file, you must first
create the file with correct ownership and permissions (usually, the
same owner and permissions of your /var/log/messages or
/usr/adm/messages file should be fine) and send a SIGHUP to syslogd.
Some systems support log rollover using a shell script or program
called newsyslog or logrotate, and you may be able to configure this
as well so that your log file doesnt grow uncontrollably.

Because the log-facility setting is controlled by the dhcpd.conf
file, log messages printed while parsing the dhcpd.conf file or before
parsing it are logged to the default log facility. To prevent this,
see the README file included with this distribution, which describes
BUG: where is that mentioned in README?
how to change the default log facility. When this parameter is used,
the DHCP server prints its startup message a second time after parsing
the configuration file, so that the log will be as complete as
possible.

The
log-threshold-high and
log-threshold-low statements

log-threshold-high percentage;

log-threshold-low percentage;

The log-threshold-low and log-threshold-high statements
are used to control when a message is output about pool usage. The
value for both of them is the percentage of the pool in use. If the
high threshold is 0 or has not been specified, no messages will be
produced. If a high threshold is given, a message is output once the
pool usage passes that level. After that, no more messages will be
output until the pool usage falls below the low threshold. If the low
threshold is not given, it default to a value of zero.

A special case occurs when the low threshold is set to be higer than
the high threshold. In this case, a message will be generated each time
a lease is acknowledged when the pool usage is above the high threshold.

Note that threshold logging will be automatically disabled for shared
subnets whose total number of addresses is larger than (2^64)-1. The server
will emit a log statement at startup when threshold logging is disabled as
shown below:

"Threshold logging disabled for shared subnet of ranges: <addresses>"

This is likely to have no practical runtime effect as CPUs are unlikely
to support a server actually reaching such a large number of leases.

The
max-lease-time statement

max-lease-time time;

Time should be the maximum length in seconds that will be assigned to a
lease.
If not defined, the default maximum lease time is 86400.
The only exception to this is that Dynamic BOOTP lease
lengths, which are not specified by the client, are not limited by
this maximum.

The
min-lease-time statement

min-lease-time time;

Time should be the minimum length in seconds that will be assigned to a
lease.
The default is the minimum of 300 seconds or
max-lease-time.

The
min-secs statement

min-secs seconds;

Seconds should be the minimum number of seconds since a client began trying to
acquire a new lease before the DHCP server will respond to its request.
The number of seconds is based on what the client reports, and the maximum
value that the client can report is 255 seconds. Generally, setting this
to one will result in the DHCP server not responding to the clients first
request, but always responding to its second request.

This can be used
to set up a secondary DHCP server which never offers an address to a client
until the primary server has been given a chance to do so. If the primary
server is down, the client will bind to the secondary server, but otherwise
clients should always bind to the primary. Note that this does not, by
itself, permit a primary server and a secondary server to share a pool of
dynamically-allocatable addresses.

The
next-server statement

next-serverserver-name;

The next-server statement is used to specify the host address of
the server from which the initial boot file (specified in the
filename statement) is to be loaded. Server-name should
be a numeric IP address or a domain name.

The
omapi-port statement

omapi-portport;

The omapi-port statement causes the DHCP server to listen for
OMAPI connections on the specified port. This statement is required
to enable the OMAPI protocol, which is used to examine and modify the
state of the DHCP server as it is running.

The
one-lease-per-client statement

one-lease-per-client flag;

If this flag is enabled, whenever a client sends a DHCPREQUEST for a
particular lease, the server will automatically free any other leases
the client holds. This presumes that when the client sends a
DHCPREQUEST, it has forgotten any lease not mentioned in the
DHCPREQUEST - i.e., the client has only a single network interface
and it does not remember leases its holding on networks to which it is
not currently attached. Neither of these assumptions are guaranteed
or provable, so we urge caution in the use of this statement.

The
pid-file-name statement

pid-file-namename;

Name should be the name of the DHCP servers process ID file. This is the
file in which the DHCP servers process ID is stored when the server
starts. By default, this is RUNDIR/dhcpd.pid. Like the
lease-file-name statement, this statement must appear in the outer scope
of the configuration file. It has no effect if overridden by the
-pf flag or the
PATH_DHCPD_PID environment variable.

The
dhcpv6-pid-file-name statement

dhcpv6-pid-file-name name;

Name is the name of the pid file to use if and only if the server is running
in DHCPv6 mode. By default, this is DBDIR/dhcpd6.pid. This statement,
like
pid-file-name,must appear in the outer scope of the configuration file. It
has no effect if overridden by the
-pf flag or the
PATH_DHCPD6_PID environment variable. If
dhcpv6-pid-file-name is not specified, but
pid-file-name is, the latter value will be used.

The
ping-check statement

ping-checkflag;

When the DHCP server is considering dynamically allocating an IP
address to a client, it first sends an ICMP Echo request (a ping)
to the address being assigned. It waits for a second, and if no
ICMP Echo response has been heard, it assigns the address. If a
response is heard, the lease is abandoned, and the server does
not respond to the client.

This ping check introduces a default one-second delay in responding
to DHCPDISCOVER messages, which can be a problem for some clients. The
default delay of one second may be configured using the ping-timeout
parameter. The ping-check configuration parameter can be used to control
checking - if its value is false, no ping check is done.

The
ping-timeout statement

ping-timeoutseconds;

If the DHCP server determined it should send an ICMP echo request (a
ping) because the ping-check statement is true, ping-timeout allows
you to configure how many seconds the DHCP server should wait for an
ICMP Echo response to be heard, if no ICMP Echo response has been received
before the timeout expires, it assigns the address. If a response is
heard, the lease is abandoned, and the server does not respond to the client.
If no value is set, ping-timeout defaults to 1 second.

The
preferred-lifetime statement

preferred-lifetimeseconds;

IPv6 addresses have 'valid' and 'preferred' lifetimes. The valid lifetime
determines at what point at lease might be said to have expired, and is no
longer useable. A preferred lifetime is an advisory condition to help
applications move off of the address and onto currently valid addresses
(should there still be any open TCP sockets or similar).

The preferred lifetime defaults to the renew+rebind timers, or 3/4 the
default lease time if none were specified.

The
prefix-length-mode statement

prefix-length-modemode;

According to RFC 3633, DHCPv6 clients may specify preferences when soliciting
prefixes by including an IA_PD Prefix option within the IA_PD option. Among
the preferences that may be conveyed is the "prefix-length". When non-zero it
indicates a clients desired length for offered prefixes. The RFC states that
servers "MAY choose to use the information...to select prefix(es)" but does
not specify any particular rules for doing so. The prefix-length-mode statement
can be used to set the prefix selection rules employed by the server,
when clients send a non-zero prefix-length value. The mode parameter must
be one of ignore, prefer, exact, minimum, or
maximum where:

1. ignore - The requested length is ignored. The server will offer the first
available prefix.

2. prefer - The server will offer the first available prefix with the same
length as the requested length. If none are found then it will offer the
first available prefix of any length.

3. exact - The server will offer the first available prefix with the same
length as the requested length. If none are found, it will return a status
indicating no prefixes available. This is the default behavior.

4. minimum - The server will offer the first available prefix with the same
length as the requested length. If none are found, it will return the first
available prefix whose length is greater than (e.g. longer than), the
requested value. If none of those are found, it will return a status
indicating no prefixes available. For example, if client requests a length
of /60, and the server has available prefixes of lengths /56 and /64, it will
offer prefix of length /64.

5. maximum - The server will offer the first available prefix with the same
length as the requested length. If none are found, it will return the first
available prefix whose length is less than (e.g. shorter than), the
requested value. If none of those are found, it will return a status
indicating no prefixes available. For example, if client requests a length
of /60, and the server has available prefixes of lengths /56 and /64, it will
offer a prefix of length /56.

In general "first available" is determined by the order in which pools are
defined in the servers configuration. For example, if a subnet is defined
with three prefix pools A,B, and C:

then the pools will be checked in the order A, B, C. For modes prefer,
minimum, and maximum this may mean checking the pools in that order
twice. A first pass through is made looking for an available prefix of exactly
the preferred length. If none are found, then a second pass is performed
starting with pool A but with appropriately adjusted length criteria.

The
remote-port statement

remote-port port;

This statement causes the DHCP server to transmit DHCP responses to DHCP
clients upon the UDP port specified in port, rather than on port 68.
In the event that the UDP response is transmitted to a DHCP Relay, the
server generally uses the local-port configuration value. Should the
DHCP Relay happen to be addressed as 127.0.0.1, however, the DHCP Server
transmits its response to the remote-port configuration value. This
is generally only useful for testing purposes, and this configuration value
should generally not be used.

The
server-identifier statement

server-identifier hostname;

The server-identifier statement can be used to define the value that
is sent in the DHCP Server Identifier option for a given scope. The
value specified must be an IP address for the DHCP server, and
must be reachable by all clients served by a particular scope.

The use of the server-identifier statement is not recommended - the only
reason to use it is to force a value other than the default value to be
sent on occasions where the default value would be incorrect. The default
value is the first IP address associated with the physical network interface
on which the request arrived.

The usual case where the
server-identifier statement needs to be sent is when a physical
interface has more than one IP address, and the one being sent by default
isnt appropriate for some or all clients served by that interface.
Another common case is when an alias is defined for the purpose of
having a consistent IP address for the DHCP server, and it is desired
that the clients use this IP address when contacting the server.

Supplying a value for the dhcp-server-identifier option is equivalent
to using the server-identifier statement.

The
server-id-check statement

server-id-check flag;

The server-id-check statement is used to control whether or not a server,
participating in failover, verifies that the value of the
dhcp-server-identifier option in received DHCP REQUESTs match the servers
id before processing the request. Server id checking is disabled by default.
Setting this flag enables id checking and thereafter the server will only
process requests that match. Note the flag setting should be consistent
between failover partners.

Unless overridden by use of the server-identifier statement, the value the
server uses as its id will be the first IP address associated with the
physical network interface on which the request arrived.

In order to reduce runtime overhead the server only checks for a server id
option in the global and subnet scopes. Complicated configurations
may result in different server ids for this check and when the server id for
a reply packet is determined, which would prohibit the server from responding.

The primary use for this option is when a client broadcasts a request
but requires that the response come from a specific failover peer.
An example of this would be when a client reboots while its lease is still
active - in this case both servers will normally respond. Most of the
time the client wont check the server id and can use either of the responses.
However if the client does check the server id it may reject the response
if it came from the wrong peer. If the timing is such that the "wrong"
peer responds first most of the time the client may not get an address for
some time.

Care should be taken before enabling this option.

The
server-duid statement

server-duid LLT [ hardware-typetimestamphardware-address ] ;

server-duid ENenterprise-numberenterprise-identifier;

server-duid LL [ hardware-typehardware-address ] ;

The server-duid statement configures the server DUID. You may pick either
LLT (link local address plus time), EN (enterprise), or LL (link local).

If you choose LLT or LL, you may specify the exact contents of the DUID.
Otherwise the server will generate a DUID of the specified type.

If you choose EN, you must include the enterprise number and the
enterprise-identifier.

If there is a server-duid statement in the lease file it will take precedence
over the server-duid statement from the config file and a
dhcp6.server-id option in the config file will override both.

The default server-duid type is LLT.

The
server-name statement

server-name name ;

The server-name statement can be used to inform the client of
the name of the server from which it is booting. Name should
be the name that will be provided to the client.

The
site-option-space statement

site-option-space name ;

The site-option-space statement can be used to determine from
what option space site-local options will be taken. This can be used
in much the same way as the vendor-option-space statement.
Site-local options in DHCP are those options whose numeric codes are
greater than 224. These options are intended for site-specific
uses, but are frequently used by vendors of embedded hardware that
contains DHCP clients. Because site-specific options are allocated
on an ad hoc basis, it is quite possible that one vendors DHCP client
might use the same option code that another vendors client uses, for
different purposes. The site-option-space option can be used
to assign a different set of site-specific options for each such
vendor, using conditional evaluation (see dhcp-eval (5) for
details).

The
stash-agent-options statement

stash-agent-options flag;

If the stash-agent-options parameter is true for a given client,
the server will record the relay agent information options sent during
the clients initial DHCPREQUEST message when the client was in the
SELECTING state and behave as if those options are included in all
subsequent DHCPREQUEST messages sent in the RENEWING state. This
works around a problem with relay agent information options, which is
that they usually not appear in DHCPREQUEST messages sent by the
client in the RENEWING state, because such messages are unicast
directly to the server and not sent through a relay agent.

The
update-conflict-detection statement

update-conflict-detection flag;

If the update-conflict-detection parameter is true, the server will
perform standard DHCID multiple-client, one-name conflict detection. If
the parameter has been set false, the server will skip this check and
instead simply tear down any previous bindings to install the new
binding without question. The default is true.

The
update-optimization statement

update-optimization flag;

If the update-optimization parameter is false for a given client,
the server will attempt a DNS update for that client each time the
client renews its lease, rather than only attempting an update when it
appears to be necessary. This will allow the DNS to heal from
database inconsistencies more easily, but the cost is that the DHCP
server must do many more DNS updates. We recommend leaving this option
enabled, which is the default. This option only affects the behavior of
the interim DNS update scheme, and has no effect on the ad-hoc DNS update
scheme. If this parameter is not specified, or is true, the DHCP server
will only update when the client information changes, the client gets a
different lease, or the clients lease expires.

The
update-static-leases statement

update-static-leases flag;

The update-static-leases flag, if enabled, causes the DHCP
server to do DNS updates for clients even if those clients are being
assigned their IP address using a fixed-address statement - that
is, the client is being given a static assignment. This can only
work with the interim DNS update scheme. It is not
recommended because the DHCP server has no way to tell that the update
has been done, and therefore will not delete the record when it is not
in use. Also, the server must attempt the update each time the
client renews its lease, which could have a significant performance
impact in environments that place heavy demands on the DHCP server.

The
use-host-decl-names statement

use-host-decl-names flag;

If the use-host-decl-names parameter is true in a given scope,
then for every host declaration within that scope, the name provided
for the host declaration will be supplied to the client as its
hostname. So, for example,

Additionally, enabling use-host-decl-names instructs the server to use
the host declaration name in the the forward DNS name, if no other values
are available. This value selection process is discussed in more detail
under DNS updates.

An option host-name statement within a host declaration will
override the use of the name in the host declaration.

It should be noted here that most DHCP clients completely ignore the
host-name option sent by the DHCP server, and there is no way to
configure them not to do this. So you generally have a choice of
either not having any hostname to client IP address mapping that the
client will recognize, or doing DNS updates. It is beyond
the scope of this document to describe how to make this
determination.

The
use-lease-addr-for-default-route statement

use-lease-addr-for-default-route flag;

If the use-lease-addr-for-default-route parameter is true in a
given scope, then instead of sending the value specified in the
routers option (or sending no value at all), the IP address of the
lease being assigned is sent to the client. This supposedly causes
Win95 machines to ARP for all IP addresses, which can be helpful if
your router is configured for proxy ARP. The use of this feature is
not recommended, because it wont work for many DHCP clients.

The
vendor-option-space statement

vendor-option-space string;

The vendor-option-space parameter determines from what option
space vendor options are taken. The use of this configuration
parameter is illustrated in the dhcp-options(5) manual page, in
the VENDOR ENCAPSULATED OPTIONS section.

Sometimes its helpful to be able to set the value of a DHCP server
parameter based on some value that the client has sent. To do this,
you can use expression evaluation. The
dhcp-eval(5) manual page describes how to write expressions. To assign the result
of an evaluation to an option, define the option as follows:

Its often useful to allocate a single address to a single client, in
approximate perpetuity. Host statements with fixed-address clauses
exist to a certain extent to serve this purpose, but because host statements
are intended to approximate 'static configuration', they suffer from not
being referenced in a littany of other Server Services, such as dynamic DNS,
failover, 'on events' and so forth.

If a standard dynamic lease, as from any range statement, is marked
'reserved', then the server will only allocate this lease to the client it
is identified by (be that by client identifier or hardware address).

In practice, this means that the lease follows the normal state engine, enters
ACTIVE state when the client is bound to it, expires, or is released, and any
events or services that would normally be supplied during these events are
processed normally, as with any other dynamic lease. The only difference
is that failover servers treat reserved leases as special when they enter
the FREE or BACKUP states - each server applies the lease into the state it
may allocate from - and the leases are not placed on the queue for allocation
to other clients. Instead they may only be 'found' by client identity. The
result is that the lease is only offered to the returning client.

Care should probably be taken to ensure that the client only has one lease
within a given subnet that it is identified by.

Leases may be set 'reserved' either through OMAPI, or through the
'infinite-is-reserved' configuration option (if this is applicable to your
environment and mixture of clients).

It should also be noted that leases marked 'reserved' are effectively treated
the same as leases marked 'bootp'.